And since we built the app, we rebuilt our status board, making it twice as good! (Literally.)

No, you’re not seeing double — this time we went with two goofy screens of stuff.

It’s pretty glorious.

About The Panels

Here are some implementation notes on our board:

Traditionally Panic is quiet about how-are-we-doing data. It always feels like a possible distraction for our hard-working team. But we’re always changing, and this revenue Graph panel has been fascinating. Every day a script totals up our direct sales data, then retrieves our App Store sales data using AppFigures and their nice API. The totals get dumped into a database, and then we make that available via a simple PHP script that outputs JSON to the Status Board. That might sound tricky, but all told it took about a day of work to make happen.

Units have been especially interesting since they reveal so much about the economics of (our) iOS software, as this Graph panel shows. Although (our) iOS apps sell a respectable number of units, the revenue they bring in barely charts compared to our Mac stalwarts. So far! We’re working hard on improving our iOS apps, and trying new ideas, in order to crack the iOS market a little bit more. (Sorry this chart was pre-Status Board, which is doing well!) By the way, Graph documentation is here.

The Support team works tirelessly to fight this tide! This is just an Email panel, which ties into our IMAP server. It took about 3 minutes to set up, and has been incredibly useful to see what our support load is at a very quick glance. (On the server, each Support person shares a single “Help” IMAP account, which has folders for each support person, and a script distributes the incoming support requests round-robin style.)

Conversely, this Graph panel this is a great way to quickly see how many support responses are going out the door. (Of course, it’s not a competition — it’s just for fun.) To get accurate Sent counts, we have a script that looks at both outgoing Twitter replies, and outgoing e-mails, and totals them up per-person into JSON.

This list is using our Table panel, connecting to an HTML file on our server. (Table documentation is here.) This is an edited version to protect our secret projects, of course. A project list is always tricky, since it’s the most manually-updated thing on the board, and always runs the risk of being stale. But, it’s fun to see who’s working on what.

What version of OS X are our users using? Using StatHat, which lets you track data incredibly quickly, I added one line of code to our PHP script that handles Sparkle updates. StatHat can output to Status Board natively via the Graph panel. Boom: instant OS version graph. (Also, fascinating how people use our Mac apps during the day, and not very much on the weekend.)

This is our car2go map, so we can quickly see if there are any cars near the office that we can hijack and drive home at the end of the day. It’s totally custom — we’re using the Do-It-Yourself panel so it’s just a little web page on our server. We signed up for the car2go API and combined their data with Google maps and some nice CSS animation. If enough people are interested, we might make this available to others. (Does your city have car2go?)

This is another Do-It-Yourself panel to show everyone’s bus lines. Sometimes end-of-the-day conversations are abruptly interrupted when we notice a bus is nearby. Logan has more recently made his own TriMet panel that we like a lot.

Of course, we’re also using the stock Weather, Twitter, and RSS panels for different things. And naturally, the Clock, to show the current time in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. You know, for conference call scheduling.

We installed a double gang outlet in the wall, to support 2 TV’s and 2 iPad chargers. Permanent power.

We applied 3M Magnet Tape to the back of our iPads. They just stick right to the back of the display:

As people continue to build new things, our Status Board seems to change every week. Since taking these photos we’ve already added GoSquared, SNMP traffic graphs, and much more. That’s the best/worst thing about Status Board: it’s now so easy to make a cool Status Board that it’s hard to know when to stop. But hey, it’s fun!

If you’ve used Status Board to make a cool status board, send us a photo!

Molly

Alex

Those connectors that you see (the HDMI out Lightning connectors) also have a USB port on them, they probably just didn’t attach them when they took the TV’s off to take the picture because I’m sure they also have power cables for the TV as well ;D

Cabel

Regarding power: I updated the post to note we have a double-gang outlet behind the wall to accommodate constant power two TV’s and two iPads. (We originally installed a fancy USB outlet for the iPads but they couldn’t provide enough to charge two iPads at once.)

And

Cem

Awesome use of data. I do have a question about the revenue graph though. Wouldn’t a “total sales revenue so far” data point be more interesting than “revenue per day”? Or, if not more interesting, at least as interesting to track? Because sales per day will swing up and down based on a bunch of factors, but I imagine seeing how much total revenue each app has brought to the company will reveal your real stalwarts over time.

Gavin

Seems a huge waste of money/resources to stickytape a whole iPad to the back of a TV.
Hopefully AppleTV supports apps and it can be run off that, or perhaps a browser-based solution that can be run off something like a Raspberry Pi.

Ben

stormgen

Stephen

I’ve been completely hooked on StatusBoard… I’ve put together 4 panels so far for work use piping in data from our servers, help desk, and client actions on the site (always good to know at a glance: what in the world are our clients doing on our system?)

Looking forward to a “spaces” kind of function on a StatusBoard update so I can pipe in more data

Roberto

Josh

What about burn in’s? On both the TV or iPad? I haven’t downloaded the app yet but is there any way to automate a full screen refresh? or perhaps have the boxes move around once every 5ish minutes to prevent a burn in?

David P.

I’m an industrial engineer and this is one of the apps in 2013 that has the greatest potential so far for my professional uses. There are many indicators that are interesting to implement in a plant and Status Board can do all the magic. Stay tuned.

Marc

can’t wait for un update of the app with multiple board support, more chart graphics joices and the ability to save dashboards within the app ! keep up the great work but please release an update soon ! : )

bill bulman

David R.

I love status board and have used it to create a metrics board for our online properties. The only problem is that i’m not a programmer so much of what the software can do is beyond my currentl skill level. It would be awesome if panic would allow in-app 3rd party widget downloads/purchases so you could find and add new modules to expand its capabilities. I would also love to see some expanded documentation on what can be done with excel and perhaps other web tools to create custom tools

Lance

Dale

The latest version was updated “at Apple’s request” to not include live updates when you are in edit mode. What’s that all about? Now you have to keep switching back and forth to see which panel you are actually changing.

Jonathan

This looks like exactly what I need for the garage I do computer work for. Would be nice if they could run it off one of the existing Macs instead of them needing an iPad. Any plans for this? Be really great if Apple would allow apps on the Apple TV’s and then this made native for it. Keep up the great work anyhow. Love Panic and their software.

Paul Imboden

Wil Ferrel

Yep +1 to Mac OSX version.. but in the meantime I created a Open Source service to get JIRA and App Annie stats in order to use it with Panic Status Board check it out and contribute.. This is an awesome App and the more services the more people will customize and use it. https://github.com/wilferrel/AGAStatusBoard